Alan S. Kahan

Ewa Atanassow

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. Liberalism today has perhaps more supporters and adversaries than any other political movement. This volume traces liberalism's global ascent through essays about some of the thinkers and actors who participated in its rise and spread. The essays included here present for the first time in one place the geographic and ideological diversity of liberal thought and practice as it developed since the eighteenth century. By exploring thinkers as diverse as Montesquieu, Abraham Lincoln, Jacob Burckhardt, Khayr al-Din, Hu Shih, John Rawls, and Czeslaw Milosz, this volume contributes toward a better understanding of liberalisms past and present. Each chapter opens with a critical passage from the author under consideration and explores the author's significance for liberalism. By facilitating a direct encounter with influential authors and texts, the volume serves as an introduction both to the multiple dimensions of liberalism and to reading texts in political thought. By engaging with particular liberal moments, the essays allow readers to create and explore conversations among liberalisms across time and space. It thus encourages a broader and more nuanced understanding of the nature and history of liberalism. Stimulating, accessible and interdisciplinary, Liberal Moments will appeal to students and scholars in the history of political thought, intellectual history and beyond.

Reading Liberal Texts

Liberal Moments

Alexis de Tocqueville

The relationship between democracy and religion is as important today as it was in Alexis de Tocqueville's time. Tocqueville, Democracy, and Religion is a ground-breaking study of the views of the greatest theorist of democracy writing about one of today's most crucial problems. Alan S. Kahan, one of today's foremost Tocqueville scholars, shows how Tocqueville's analysis of religion is simultaneously deeply rooted in his thoughts on nineteenth-century France and America and pertinent to us today. Tocqueville thought that the role of religion was to provide checks and balances for democracy in the spiritual realm, just as secular forces should provide them in the political realm. He believed that in the long run secular checks and balances were dependent on the success of spiritual ones. Kahan examines how Tocqueville thought religion had succeeded in checking and balancing democracy in America, and failed in France, as well as observing Tocqueville's less well-known analyses of religion in Ireland and England, and his perspective on Islam and Hinduism. He shows how Tocqueville's 'post-secular' account of religion can help us come to terms with religion today. More than a study of Tocqueville on religion in democratic society, this volume offers us a re-interpretation of Tocqueville as a moralist and a student of human nature in democratic society; a thinker whose new political science was in the service of a new moral science aimed at encouraging democratic people to attain greatness as human beings. Tocqueville, Democracy, and Religion gives us a new Tocqueville for the twenty-first century.

Checks and Balances for Democratic Souls

Tocqueville, Democracy, and Religion

Perché gli intellettuali non amano il capitalismo? Saggi, romanzi, opere teatrali e manifesti: da sempre gli uomini di cultura puntano il dito contro i mali prodotti dal sistema economico basato sulla proprietà privata. Posizioni simili uniscono personalità molto diverse tra loro: da Gustave Flaubert a Karl Marx, da T.S. Eliot a Friedrich Nietzsche, da Ezra Pound a Pablo Picasso. Da due secoli, l’intellighenzia rifiuta il progresso economico e la libera impresa, affidandosi di volta in volta a movimenti politici diversi, dal nazionalismo al socialismo, dal fascismo al comunismo, col solo obiettivo di superare il grigiore e la volgarità della società commerciale. Ai nostri giorni, come scrive Kahan nella sua prefazione, tutti i movimenti populisti «esprimono una comune antipatia per il libero mercato e per la crescente autorità delle organizzazioni sovranazionali che incoraggiano la libera circolazione dei capitali e delle persone (cioè l’immigrazione)». "La guerra degli intellettuali al capitalismo" racconta la storia di questo scontro, prova a spiegare i motivi di tale ostilità e tenta di individuare possibili forme di convivenza pacifica fra intellighenzia e mondo produttivo. Perché la guerra tra “mente” e “denaro” è il grande conflitto, ancora irrisolto, della società moderna.

La guerra degli intellettuali al capitalismo

Alexis de Tocqueville was the author of two masterpieces, Democracry in America and The Old Regime and the Revolution. In this volume, Alan S. Kahan, one of the world's leading authorities on Tocqueville's work, presents an accessible and rigorous account of the French author's ideas set in the context of his life and times. It sets out the essential tensions and ambiguities in Tocqueville's thought and analyzes the idea that made him such a compelling and insightful thinker.

Olivier Zunz

The Tocqueville Reader includes not only Tocqueville's major writing but also travel letters, conversations with ministers and politicians, and diary entries not originally intended for the public. It includes twenty-nine pieces never before translated into English, and a wide-ranging editorial introduction that gives an account of Tocqueville's life as a politician and inspirations as a writer.

A Life in Letters and Politics

The Tocqueville Reader

For the past 150 years, Western intellectuals have trumpeted contempt for capitalism and capitalists. They have written novels, plays, and manifestos to demonstrate the evils of the economic system in which they live. Dislike and contempt for the bourgeoisie, the middle classes, industry, and commerce have been a prominent trait of leading Western writers and artists. Mind vs. Money is an analytical history of how and why so many intellectuals have opposed capitalism. It is also an argument for how this opposition can be tempered. Historically, intellectuals have expressed their rejection of capitalism through many different movements, including nationalism, anti-Semitism, socialism, fascism, communism, and the 1960s counterculture. Hostility to capitalism takes new forms today. The anti-globalization, Green, communitarian, and New Age movements are all examples. Intellectuals give such movements the legitimacy and leadership they would otherwise lack. What unites radical intellectuals of the nineteenth century, communists and fascists of the twentieth, and anti-globalization protestors of the twenty-first, along with many other intellectuals not associated with these movements, is their rejection of capitalism. Kahan argues that intellectuals are a permanently alienated elite in capitalist societies. In myriad forms, and on many fronts, the battle between Mind and Money continues today. Anti-Americanism is one of them. Americans like to see their country as a beacon of freedom and prosperity. But in the eyes of many European and American intellectuals, when America is identified with capitalism, it is transformed from moral beacon into the "Great Satan." This is just one of the issues Mind vs. Money explores. The conflict between Mind and Money is the great, unresolved conflict of modern society. To end it, we must first understand it.

Alan S. Kahan

Books

Your next favorite book is out there